Cool Bikes By The Bay

My summer theme has definitely been trying to make some cool images that have nothing to do with hockey. The thinking is that it will help me become a better all-around photographer and theoretically, that will help make me a better hockey photographer.

With that in mind, I called up a couple of my buddies that have cool motorcycles and asked them if they wanted to do some photos. They were a little skeptical at first but after a bit of convincing (begging?) I was able to talk them into it. I promised them that my goal was to make some shots that they would think looked very cool.

We started with a few on the open road to get the wind-in-the-hair look (well, for Aaron anyway, not so much for Jim). We had to wait out some rain so the sun was going down pretty quickly. Pretty much everything I got from the front was blown out by their headlights.

After giving up on the road shots and agreeing to try to do them another day when we had a bit more light, we went looking for a good place for some portraits. The sun was going down and we were getting some really cool colours in the sky so we decided to do something down by the Bay with the sunset in the background.

I was able to talk Aaron (who was hobbling from a weird accident at work earlier in the day) to get his bike down very close to the water. He wasn't thrilled about the idea until I started showing him the images that we were getting on the back of the camera.

All-in-all, I was really happy with how these ones turned out. I'm hoping to get out soon with some more daylight to do some panning and other techniques that I have learned at the race track.

All of these shots were with my Nikon D700 with a 24-70mm 2.8 lens. For the still shots, I used one SB-800 strobe with some light shapers that were professionally managed by my wife and partner Shelley. Not much retouching on them (obviously a sepia tone and some burning on the second one). What you see is pretty much what came out of the camera. I did a print of the first image and added some more burning and tried to eliminate some of the reflections in the chrome.